Tag Project Mercury

Some Sci-Tech Links

More link dumpage:

MSNBC reports that the Discovery Channel says it has remastered all of the NASA film footage from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space flights in high-definition video, and that NASA will make the videos available to the public for free at its archives. The story doesn’t say whether that includes online access, but the films have been incorporated into a six-hour series that will run on the Discovery Channel in June, so get your TiVo ready.

Contrary to popular belief, people do not use only 10% of their brains (unless, of course, they are Republicans). PsyBlog, a British blog about topics in psychology, offers this list of Top Ten Brain Myths that most of us have at one time or another heard and/or accepted as fact. You might be surprised at one or two of them.

eSkeptic, the website of Skeptic Magazine, has this feature article from environmental engineering expert Dr. Tapio Schneider entitled “How We Know Global Warming Is Real”. Recommend this to your disbelieving right-wing friends and associates, but don’t expect them to pay much attention because it includes things like facts and figures that most of them think are “pretend”.

Concerned about the proliferation of RFID tags in everything from passports to grocery packaging? I am. Luckily, the always-enterprising folks at Instructables.com have devised a fool-proof method for neutralizing RFID tags: smash them with a hammer. It causes the least-visible cosmetic damage to those flat RFIDs that are in your passport or on your credit card, so that The Man won’t tase you, bro when he thinks you’ve tampered with it.

Geeks everywhere are limbering up their salivary glands for the expected release of the 3G iPhone in June, but the suits at Research In Motion (R.I.M.), which makes the Blackberry (the favorite toy of gadget-head biz-wizzes everywhere), are none too pleased. This NYT article from a couple of weeks ago explains how Steverino has decided to aim for the enterprise market, and how his Reality Distortion Field may be strong enough to push the Crackberry out of the briefcase of every road warrior in America.

Lastly, joe of the eponymous bookofjoe.com tells us that those crazy youngsters have figured out another totally cool thing you can do with Google Maps and “smart mobs”: find stolen cars faster than Lojack.

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To Infinity And Beyond!

mercuryjoe.jpg

When I was 8 or 9 years old, my brother Tim and I had a “GI Joe” Christmas — we got the original foot-tall, nappy-haired, non-Kung-Fu-gripped GI Joe dolls action figures, the “Command Center” action set, the helicopter with rotating blades, the jeep, and a pile of other accessories. We were in hog heaven. We played with those dolls action figured endlessly.

We never had the GI Joe space capsule, but a kid I used to play with did. His collection complemented ours pretty well — we had stuff he didn’t have and vice versa — so I could haul the toys to his house to play and we’d have an amazingly complete collection to work from.

The “GI Joe In Space” toys are now among the most sought-after collectibles among toy collectors, so if this guy still has the capsule 35 years later, it’s worth a lot. The capsule, of course, was just a toy for playing with in your living room, but one thing we used to like to do with our GI Joes was to strap them into a parachute rig and throw them from the ski jump in the park across the street from our house. If we’d tried that with the space capsule, it would have shattered into a pile of plastic space debris on the first trip, I’m sure.

But, for all my fellow 40-somethings who grew up with GI Joe and dreamed of all the cool things we could do with our dolls action figures, here’s one fellow geek who has dared to live the dream: he constructed a non-scale (but quite large) working model of a Mercury rocket, using the space capsule as the launch vehicle, and a Space Joe as the astronaut.

His attempt to record in-capsule video with a PenCam failed, but he does have some video and photographs of the project for you to peruse. Warpspeed, Astronaut Joe!

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